Delhi NGOs initiate a process to survey the city's homeless people and reach welfare schemes to them. IN the narrow lanes of Khari Baoli, Asia's largest wholesale spice and grocery market in the crowded Old Delhi area near the Red Fort, labourers grapple with heavy sacks of grain, pulses, and so on as they load them on to wooden trolleys or unload them from trucks. There is no room for...

VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at...

Sharda, a 17-year-old mother, gave birth to her first child in February in a village in Noida, just a few hours' drive outside New Delhi. Though her son was born premature and weak, he received no treatment. In many parts of India, particularly in poor and marginalized communities, a woman is considered impure for a fortnight after giving birth. After labor, Sharda was relegated to a makeshift room outside her...

A leading rights group has accused India of hoodwinking the public over its claims of improving maternal health, as renewed efforts began at the United Nations to cut global poverty. Human Rights Watch said the government in New Delhi was wrong to focus on the number of women who give birth in health facilities as a measure of progress rather than how many survive the delivery and post-delivery period. The group's Asia...

A combination of factors led by state policy has enabled the southern State to become a notable achiever with respect to some key indicators of development. In 2001, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen recorded an eyebrow-raising fact in his book, “Development as Freedom”, that Tamil Nadu and Kerala had both achieved much faster rates of decline in fertility than China had achieved since it introduced its one-child policy. That same year, the international...